(LifeSiteNews) — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani will attend the Archdiocese of New York’s 25th anniversary Mass for the victims of 9/11 at the invitation of Pope Leo XIV-appointed Archbishop of New York Ronald Hicks.
The Muslim mayor will attend Hicks’ 5 p.m. Mass, concelebrated with Bishop Robert Brennan of Brooklyn along with an invitation-only congregation of 9/11 victims’ families, members of the New York Police Department, and other city officials, according to Democrat Christopher Hale, author of the Letters from Leo blog.
Mamdani was invited to the Mass despite being the first New York City mayor in at least 86 years to skip the local archbishop’s installation ceremony and despite his radically anti-Catholic positions: He vehemently supports abortion, gender “reassignment” procedures, and homosexual “marriage.”
The mayor favors effectively unlimited abortion-on-demand and, per Planned Parenthood, “doubling funding for both New York City’s Abortion Access Hub and the New York Abortion Access Fund (NYAAF),” and has threatened to put crisis pregnancy centers out of business, as previously covered by LifeSiteNews.
He has also committed, according to Planned Parenthood’s statement endorsing him, to “confronting private health care institutions that have refused to provide” so-called “gender transition” procedures.
After missing Hicks’ installation, Mamdani attended a St. Patrick’s Day Mass during which Hicks supported immigrants amid the Trump administration’s ICE raids.
At the outset of the St. Patrick’s Day parade, the mayor called Hicks “someone who will be an inspiration not just to Catholic New Yorkers but New Yorkers across the five boroughs.”
Questions have been raised about the orthodoxy of Hicks after it was reported that his chancellor when he served as bishop of Joliet, Illinois, Robert Salvato, was “married” to another man. Salvato was appointed chancellor by Hicks in 2021. As chancellor, Salvato was responsible for advising Hicks on issues related to canon law and recording ecclesiastical acts, decrees, and dispensations issued by the bishop.